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Sunday, September 12, 2010

Matcha macarons

Macarons are sly and finicky creatures. They slowly creep into your life, eventually overtaking it even, and before you know it, from feeling indifferent towards them, you become addicted to them. However, churning out these devious lil things are not 100 per cent fool-proof. Though from my very first attempt, I've mostly encountered success, lately, the macaron baking fairy seemed to have shun me for others.

These stupid matcha flavoured macs? Took me not one, not two but three attempts to see something remotely resembling macs. The first two batches were disasters that looked severely disfigured beyond words, best buried in the deep recess of soon-to-be-forgotten memories (hey, I've got a very short memory span, which works well in such times). I suspected that they failed because the egg whites weren't beaten properly, so for this fortunate third batch, I made sure to whip the whites longer...

And hey yo, they finally passed the visual test (barely), and though they have really flat feet, as least they resemble macs yeah. I was going to seriously cry and stomp my feet if they failed, cos you know, matcha powder is not cheap. Ha.

Matcha macarons with red bean paste filling

I couldn't find ready-made red bean paste when I was planning to make these, so I decided to buy a bag of red beans and cook the paste myself. It was really easy to cook the paste, and I like that I can just cook a small portion to suit my needs, rather than buy a bag of paste and worry about not finishing the whole package in time.

I was originally planning to make a red bean ganache or red bean buttercream to sandwich the matcha macs. But after previous two failures, I wasn't sure if I should go ahead and make the filling just yet, so only after I pulled out the third batch from the oven did I worry about what to fill them with. By then, I was already quite lazy to do the ganache or buttercream, and decided to sandwich the macs with the red bean paste straight without any further frills.

As I added more than enough matcha powder to the macs, these weren't overtly sweet as normal macs are, and with the slightly sweetened red bean paste, they tasted really Japanese-y. ;) The matcha flavour was quite intense, loved the flavour combination. I'd imagine I would like a small cookie like this at the end of a Japanese meal, to go with a cuppa hot green tea. Hmmmm. Then followed by some matcha ice cream...Doesn't that sound very matcha-y? (: